The Producers Guild of America (PGA) announced today that celebrated producer David Heyman will be honored with the 2016 David O. Selznick Achievement Award, recognizing the producer’s outstanding body of work in motion pictures. The award will be presented to Heyman at the Annual Producers Guild Awards ceremony on Saturday, January 23, 2016 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles.

Heyman has received critical and popular acclaim worldwide for his innovative and imaginative work on films including GRAVITY, winner of the Guild’s Daryl F. Zanuck Award, the wildly successful children’s film PADDINGTON, the moving drama THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS and the beloved HARRY POTTER franchise. Despite its conclusion in 2011, HARRY POTTER continues to rank among the highest grossing film franchises of all time.

Producers Guild Awards Co-Chairs Michael DeLuca (SOCIAL NETWORK, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS) and Jennifer Todd (ALICE IN WONDERLAND, CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER) stated, "With HARRY POTTER, David Heyman set the standard for contemporary franchise filmmaking, demonstrating an unerring ability to translate a cherished literary universe to the screen, with all of its depth, humor and heart intact. He has embraced innovation, taking the technical production challenges of GRAVITY as a mandate to imagine and execute wholly new ways of shooting film. His work has consistently elevated our profession and our industry; in his hands, the movie screen offers the same satisfactions as the literature that often inspires his stories. We couldn’t imagine a more fitting recipient for the Selznick Award than David.”

The 2015 recipient of the David O. Selznick Award was Gale Anne Hurd. Previous recipients include Stanley Kramer, Billy Wilder, Clint Eastwood, Jerry Bruckheimer, Brian Grazer, Laura Ziskin, Kathleen Kennedy & Frank Marshall, Scott Rudin and Steven Spielberg.

"I am honored to receive this award, named after such a giant of the industry, from my peers at the PGA. And as I look at the list of past recipients I am deeply humbled to join an illustrious group of filmmakers who have been such an inspiration to me over the years,” said Heyman.

About David Heyman

Producer David Heyman is currently filming FANTASTIC BEASTS and WHERE TO FIND THEM, written by J.K. Rowling and directed by David Yates, with Eddie Redmayne in the lead role, and in post-production on an adaptation of the bestselling novel THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS, written and directed by Derek Cianfrance and starring Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz and Alicia Vikander.

Heyman’s latest productions include the critically acclaimed blockbuster GRAVITY (2013), directed by Alfonso Cuaron, and starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney - the film won seven Academy Awards®, as well as six BAFTA Awards, the PGA Award for Outstanding Producer of a Feature Film, and numerous others; the film adaptation of Vera Brittain’s WW1 memoir, TESTAMENT OF YOUTH (2014), starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington; and PADDINGTON (2014), the adaptation of Michael Bond’s universally beloved books, written and directed by Paul King, and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins - PADDINGTON has become the most successful non-studio children’s film of all time.

Heyman is best known however for producing all the film adaptations of J.K Rowling’s hugely successful Harry Potter books, an extraordinary journey which began when he famously read the first book prior to its publication and spotted its film potential. He went on to produce eight HARRY POTTER films (2001-2011), the most successful film franchise in cinema history.

Amongst his other producing credits are comedies WE'RE THE MILLERS’, directed by Rawson Thurber, starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudekis, and YES MAN, directed by Peyton Reed, starring Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel: Francis Lawrence’s science fiction thriller I AM LEGEND, starring Will Smith.

Educated in the UK and the United States (where he majored in Art History at Harvard), David Heyman moved to Los Angeles in 1986 to become a creative executive at Warner Bros. In the late 80s he became a Vice President at United Artists.